Microsoft calls for a closer look at app stores - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/19/21296657/microsoft-apple-app-store-antitrust-comments <comment><USER2> When Microsoft helped me get Krita in the Windows Store I hadn't much expectations. Now the Windows Store and Steam (fifty/fifty) bring in enough to pay me and six other people to work on Krita almost full-time. It has saved me from having to find a day job that would have driven me round the bend for sure.

That said, it sucks that I cannot tell people they can also download Krita from krita.org. There's always the fear that some day, the Windows Store will be closed, or Krita will be kicked out or whatever.

Publishing in an app store means you're a sharecropper, with all that entails.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that's the thing that's so annoying about at least the windows (TIL) and Apple App Store: you cannot mention any other option.

If they were so confident in the convenience they offered they would allow you to mention other options. This reeks of anti-competitiveness.

<comment><USER4> The issue, I think, is not that Apple sets draconian rules in their store. Their store, their rules.

It's that I, a user, cannot choose to sideload an app I want to use on my device or choose to use a different store.

<comment><USER5> >It's that I, a user, cannot choose to sideload an app

That's only half the equation. I run android, but have no google account. I have always used a combination of aptoide, f-droid and manually downloaded apk's for my apps.

When all the covid apps were released and governments were encouraging people to download them, do you think they put the APK on a government website for people to download?

Nope, just links to the app store. Of course, most of those apps relied on google play services API's for a bunch of stuff, so it's not like they would have worked anyway.

It's not enough to merely allow sideloading. If the expectation isn't that mobile devices are a diverse ecosystem and that it's not good enough for developers to pick one store and bugger the rest, you've achieved very little. Most people could not be bothered going through what I do to keep my phone clean.

<comment><USER4> It is very troubling that to use public services, one must agree to an arbitrary and abusive private company contractual agreement (TOS).

<comment><USER5> I've not yet found that to be the case, although I fear that one day it will.

I generally find that all you need to do is tell people their solution is not acceptable. All the banks in Iceland are trying really hard to convince people that phone based 2FA is the only option. However, I went to my bank and informed them that I don't take my phone with me when I travel overseas and I require another option. They tried a few other variations of "but you could use your phone this way", but once they realized I wasn't joking when I said "I often just don't have a phone with me, find me something else" it turns out that the physical 2FA tokens totally still work, they just don't like telling people.

Generally speaking, the people providing these things have a boss who expects them to make sure things run smoothly. They'll try to force you to use the app if that's the easiest path, but as soon as they realise that trying to force you to use the app will be much more painful for them than just giving you another option, they'll find another option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a full view of not just what an executive says, but Microsoft's actions here:

The Windows app store gives a 95/5 cut to developers, as long as the download happened from an external link to the page. If the discovery happened via an app store search or marketing within the app store, that cut changes to 85/15 [1]

I would also like to find some revenue split data for the Xbox store, though I imagine that's far more nuanced, with many different contracts for different third parties. If I'm an indie developer with no negotiating power, is that a 70/30?

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue- share...](https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-share/)

<comment><USER7> It seems every thread there is a comment on console. They are _not_ the same.

Console is a loss leader, or sold at cost. No one on planet Earth could make an exact replica of Playstation 5 or Xbox 5 for discount. And that is excluding all the IP, R&D and Software / OS Development involved. The 30% is where they make the money. And personally that is a fair share.

Microsoft also make their profits via selling OS to OEM and Business. The current App Store model are there to help distribution of Software. And the 5% are essentially zero considering you will have to paid ~3% for credit processing any way. i.e Linking to the App Store frees you the burden and duty of hosting yourself for free.

Edit: And if you dont mind share why you downvote.

<comment><USER8> I'm also not sure that the "but consoles are closed" argument would be a slam dunk anyway, even if they were exactly the same, because I would absolutely support either requiring Microsoft to open up the XBox or allowing game developers to bypass Microsoft's controls.

It's not clear to me why loss-leading consoles are a good thing for consumers. It just means that:

A) games will be more expensive, because Microsoft needs to make more money on them, and

B) a smaller number of games will be made, because the barrier of entry to profitability on any single game will be increased by forcing developers to subsidize Microsoft's costs.

Microsoft is still going to make the same amount of money regardless. They'll either charge upfront, or that cost will be passed on to consumers in the form of more expensive, less experimental games.

So, I dunno. People who make the comparison between Apple and XBox should maybe be careful what they wish for, because I'm more than happy to go after XBox, Playstation, and Switch with the exact same criticisms. I am skeptical that there are many indie game developers who are happy that they need to jump through hoops to get development consoles, or sign NDAs just to target a platform.

<comment><USER9> XBox is kind of open, via UWP based games.

The game development communities are exactly the opposite of HN culture, there no one cares about FOSS ideals and stuff, it is all about IP and getting their ideas into the gamer's hands no matter how.

In fact, nowadays I see as a mistake having spent so much time around FOSS during the university back in the 90's, which caused a bit of schizophrenic considerations when going across communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh, how the tables have turned! I still remember Microsoft's chokehold on the entire industry in the 1990s, their "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy, and nearly total monopoly.

Now the wolf is an advocate for the sheep :-)

<comment><USER11> Fuck Microsoft. I recently updated Windows and had to go through an unskippable ad for Edge. After the ad, I had to go through an unskippable setup process for Edge, even though I don't use it. After I got through that, I had to tell Edge not to make itself the default browser, unpin it from my start menu, where it was added by Windows, then remove it from desktop, where it was added by Windows. I'm a paying customer, and they're plastering their shit all over my computer, just like they did in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Don't be a fool and think Microsoft has changed because they give away VSCode and have added features to Github. This isn't a goodwill measure, it's a lock in measure. They're quietly trying to lock in engineers into their platform, just like they're trying to keep gamers locked in to their platform.

They're trying to look like the scrappy little guy competing against Apple, but this only after their Windows App store has failed to do anything. They wait until their hand busts before tattling - if the Windows store succeeds, they happily go along with it. If it fails, they talk about how great a tragedy it is for the American consumer.

<comment><USER12> Exactly, people forget that Valve developed SteamOS after Microsoft's shenanigans, when they tried to lockout 3rd party programs i.e. build it's own "app store"

<comment><USER13> Valve, the company that almost holds a monopoly on the PC games distribution.

<comment><USER14> Epic Game Store and Xbox Game Store for PC are making headway.

Epic just gave away amazing games for a month or two. I got GTA5 and Civ6 for free amongst other treasures.

<comment><USER15> It's worth noting that Epic Games isn't really making headway into the market by providing innovation. They're just dumping money into it, making everything worse for Linux users.

<comment><USER9> With its drive for fragmentation, even with a gaming distribution like SteamOS, Linux gaming community keeps changing between 1 and 2%.

No one is betting their business in such tiny communities, while having exponential costs in development and dealing with very vocal and entitled gamers.

So naturally a couple of studios test waters, and then they just target Android instead.

<comment><USER15> Do you have a source for Linux users being "very vocal and entitled"? Someone linked this Twitter thread here and, while they ultimately chose to stop supporting Linux, the picture painted of Linux users is very different from what you describe. [https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760](https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760)

<comment><USER9> Really? Is that so hard to find?

[https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3409](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3409)

[https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1223457395419930627...](https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1223457395419930627?s=20)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pot, kettle: The Azure Marketplace for b2b apps is also 20-30%. Worse, while most app stores pay out 30-60 days after use, Azure can hold on to your payments about 3-6mo. I am a fan of the concept, but this kind of stuff is entirely flexing and broken PM politics. Imagine if Intel did that to juice proceeds of all x86 users for a couple of years!

<comment><USER17> While this isn't entirely comparable (just run compute on Azure and install your services). I'm pretty sure this is a reason Steam completely gave up on their remote app for iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple's demand for 30% of all in-app purchases, with no other way to get an app onto their platform, and its increasing censorship efforts to block an app from informing a user of alternative payment methods, isn't going to last, because antitrust regulators are going to kill it.

</comment><comment><USER19> The credit card companies found that 1-3% is all they get away with skimming from the top. That being said they have massive volumes. I wonder why everyone is so accepting of such a massive cut of the profits. We need to demand 2% and NO MORE of a cut of profits and that should go to everything from Ubers to software sales.

I think a really low percentage wave is going to disrupt these markets as new competitors that are bootstrapped, slimmed down and not VC money hungry enter the scene. All it takes is for people to start demanding they get paid for the real work and not the sale.

<comment> w-m Interchange fees on personal credit cards have been capped to 0.3% in the EU (in a law from 2015). As a result, there are no 1-2% cash back options for cards to keep track of or any other silliness, you can just use your credit card as a method of payment, without thinking about which card to use for what.

I'd personally welcome similar regulation caps on app stores (higher than 0.3%, but also certainly lower than 30%) in the EU.

<comment><USER20> > _As a result, there are no 1-2% cash back options for cards to keep track of > or any other silliness, you can just use your credit card as a method of > payment, without thinking about which card to use for what._

In other words, consumers get offered fewer options, which results in a far worse deal, overall, but in exchange they can avoid the hassle of evaluating all the better options they'd have if they hadn't been legislated away.

<comment> w-m I'm not too familiar with day-to-day payments in the US (I'm in Germany), so please enlighten me if I have something wrong here. Is there an actual option I have as a consumer to avoid the fee when buying something?

My understanding: everybody pays the same price, independently of payment method. If the standard credit card interchange fee is 2%, then the vendor has to raise their prices by around 2% to make the same amount of money on the product. As a consumer, I would have to pay the 2% of the inflated price if I pay by cash (or debit card or something).

So I'm forced to pay by credit card with a cash back option or some other rewards to make back part of the 2% that were added on top of the original price.

I lose, if I don't play the game, and I'm back around a zero-sum-game if I do play along. In any case, the credit card company wins.

If the fees are capped, the vendor doesn't have to raise the price, and the consumer wins no matter the payment method.

<comment><USER21> I only have a couple potential counterpoints:

1) The 2% fee might mostly be captured by the credit company and thus represent a net benefit to most consumers (at the expense of retailers) because retailers tend to want prices like 1.99 and would be reluctant to raise that to 2.01 because of the reduced sales. Over time there might be other options like slightly reduced portion sizes to help the store, but profiting a little bit extra on most products is hard, and profiting a lot extra on a few products is near impossible because consumers will buy from competitors.

2) The 2% fee isn't reimbursed equally to all consumers, so individuals with higher credit scores might have a preference for the current system even if it's a zero-sum game overall. (this point also easily allows arguments the other way in favor of regulating fees because we probably shouldn't be extracting an additional percent here and there from young people and those with financial hardships)

<comment><USER22> >The 2% fee might mostly be captured by the credit company and thus represent a net benefit to most consumers (at the expense of retailers) because retailers tend to want prices like 1.99

How does it benefit the consumer if the credit company takes 2%? I cannot see why it would make a difference to the consumer (at least in the short term) whether the retailer or the credit company takes the 2%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the level of irony here is so off the scale that it threatens to tear a rip in the fabric of space itself.

<comment><USER24> The irony of Microsoft also running a closed ecosystem on XBox? If Apple is forced to individually negotiate with developers, they can and will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why Google's strategy with PWA (Progressive Web App) intrigues me, although android is not a walled garden (sideload, 3rd party appstores) pushing for PWAs seems counter intuitive to increase its Playstore revenue; same reason why Apple has been hesitant about supporting PWA.

So what's the deal? It's hard to beleive Google cares more about open web platform than their Playstore revenue or it's just they want to ditch android/ART completely in future.

P.S. As a consumer I'm glad PWA exists and can't wait to see the end of duopoly in the smartphone ecosystem.

<comment><USER26> I think the answer is simply that Google is massive and sometimes competes with itself. Android's Instant Apps, announced a few years ago (seemingly to go nowhere?) seemed like a direct attack on the use case for web sites, but the company tolerated it.

As a whole I think Google wants to chase ubiquity. A PWA will work on laptops, phones, Windows, Mac, Android... an Android app won't. So they'll push PWAs.

<comment><USER25> I too thought of just blaming it on Google's idiosyncrasy, but PWA has stood the test of time with multiple parties (browsers) extending their support.

Perhaps, I'm thinking other way round; May be PWA was supposed to kill traditional web apps and was intended to bring web apps to Playstore/Appstore but it didn't happen(yet).

>Android's Instant Apps, announced a few years ago (seemingly to go nowhere?) seemed like a direct attack on the use case for web sites, but the company tolerated it.

I think android instant apps are meant for Google Assistant ecosystem, Google Smart Display have it and Fuchsia would have GA; so instant apps might come handy.

<comment><USER27> PWAs can be bundled up for the Play store: [https://medium.com/@firt/google- play-store-now-open-for-prog...](https://medium.com/@firt/google-play-store- now-open-for-progressive-web-apps-ec6f3c6ff3cc)

<comment><USER25> Correct, I meant to say PWA hasn't taken off as much as Google wanted.

<comment><USER27> They have made it unusually difficult to get it bundled up for the Play store. I mean, it should be as simple as proving ownership and supplying the manifest URL. I think solving the distribution problem would definitely be key to having developers think about it as an alternative to native apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great. Presumably microsoft will also be opening up their xbox to run whatever software I like without going through them too then?

</comment><comment><USER29> Is Microsoft doing that because their store never took off? Probably yes.

Should governments take a closer look into app stores? Absolutely yes, those games are rigged, monopolistic, and broken.

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree with Microsoft for the same reason they do. I don't own one.

<comment><USER31> Xbox is a thing, and Microsoft is the sole gatekeeper for that platform. Obviously the Microsoft Store is also available on Windows, though it's easy to go around it there, of course.

It's decently likely a ruling around app stores will have impact not just on mobile and desktop, but the console world as well.

<comment><USER32> At least with a console you have the option of buying a physical copy of the game and loading it onto the device, compared to mobile where you need to enable developer mode in order to load apps from alternate sources (and even then, it's not an officially supported method as the steps can change significantly between versions).

But I do agree that there will be a console war if this is continued. I would hope that it leads down the "I own this device" route and level the playing field in general - I've paid Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony the money for the device, therefore I should have the right to run whatever I want on it. Gatekeeping what can be run on a device is a significant problem that needs to be resolved, along with the right to repair (Apple's a good example of the problems) and the second hand market (Tesla is a good example of the problems).

<comment><USER33> Except that the physical copy of the game is still gatekept by Microsoft or Sony. People complain about apple's app store and 30% tax but compare that to the craziness it takes to get on a console and it's not even close.

As a developer I pay Apple $99 a year and i can release my app to the store as long as it meets some pretty lose guidelines. To get on a console you have to basically audition your game and met some arbitrary guidelines that aren't published anywhere. Either a company can build a curated system or they can't. XBox, PS4, and the switch aren't monopolies for gaming and iOS or Android aren't monopolies for mobile.

<comment><USER34> > Except that the physical copy of the game is still gatekept by Microsoft or > Sony.

And Nintendo.

I don't follow consoles these days, but the gatekeeping by region that console makers used to do (even if I understand the reasons behind them) was incredibly annoying as well.

I think the perception of game consoles is different from PCs and mobile devices. Even though the game console is a computer, they're still not seen by the public or governments as a general computing platform no matter how blurred the lines have become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are there many applications these days which are not available as a "web app" aka website?

If we (developers) go for a "website first" approach, there is not much the device manufacturers can do against people using our products.

From a business perspective, is there a strong incentive to develop apps at all, when you already have a website?

Any stories of startups that had a running website already and then boosted their usage by an order of magnitude by adding apps for the various appstores?

<comment><USER36> > Are there many applications these days which are not available as a "web > app" aka website?

Pretty much no, with a few exceptions:

1\. Any kind of hardcore gaming

2\. Any kind of CPU/memory/disk intensive media production software (though this is becoming less so)

3\. Any kind of infrastructure application; you wouldn't run a web server or database in the browser (yet)

<comment><USER37> 4\. Any kind of application that needs to interface with a server that doesn't support TCP (webRTC kinda solves that, but not really, at least not yet)

5\. Any kind of application that needs to feel fast. I have a pretty fast phone & computer, but I really feel the difference between a web app and a native app. A bit of data viewing is alright on the internet, but real productivity for prolonged periods of time? I'd rather have a native app.

6\. Anything at all that needs to interface with your device. Web apps are extremely locked down, and for good reason, but this does mean that you can't use them as a file manager for instance.

Applications that only need to display, search and edit some data are absolutely fine as a webapp. Anything else gets a lot harder. Although I do feel like we are slowly shifting to more and more web based apps. For better or for worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I find the feeling of rooting for Microsoft very strange indeed but the Apple Appstore is really a thing that needs to be broken down/opened up ASAP. Microsoft gets slapped over IE and Media Player but Apple can go way further and lock out every browser but their own (all iOS browsers are just a skin on Safari). Apple has become what Microsoft used to be - IMHO worse.

</comment><comment><USER39> Even if Microsoft is doing this out of self interest/business...they are still 100% right on this.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's interesting that app stores rose in the 2000s when we were at the tail end of selling software in boxes. Margins on packaged software were often 5-15% at the distributor level and 10-25% at the retail level for consumer software. For enterprise software, it was customary to make 40% on the first license and 10-20% on upgrades. So, the app stores aren't too far off of what the reseller share would have been...

<comment><USER41> That was the original argument by Steve...But imagine a world where you couldn't just give software to someone you know without going to the big box store, giving it to them first and agreeing that if the other person wanted to pay for it the store would take 30%? Even worse, the big box stores back then also bought shipments ahead of sale and managed inventory, sales, and the like. The publisher would pay production and take B2B orders at a 30% cut or so. The issue is that they both are asking for 30% while doing basically little to nothing to deserve it (with the app store netting very few devs any sort of promotion value), applying the rules to only some companies, while also outright banning the sale of software elsewhere.

Maybe this is fair in a small company but in a large company that controls 70% of the US market? Thats borderline like setting up a tax on an entire industry as if your company was a state in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, right. Everyone is unhappy when they are the underdog, had the Store not been a failure and the tune would be something else.

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh Brad Smith. Like, only few years back he was heading Microsoft's onslaught against Linux and open source with exactly the opposite, calling Microsoft technology "open" because they published APIs. I wonder where Republican law makers got their straight face hypocrisy and cynicism if not from companies like Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER43> It is so strange that corporations fights for what essentially is iPhone owners freedoms.

The right to repair - fix app store owner decisions.

And that's not the worst. Apple sells devices with limited support. Perfectly functioning devices with no way to change OS once it become unsupported. Devices with expiration date.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why not broaden the spectrum and regulate market places overall?

Amazon, AppStore, PlayStore, etc.

The pattern is the same:

\- Bend/ignore/disregard rules for their own products;

\- Leverage data from competition for their advantage within the market place;

\- Ban/exclude/penalize products from one day to the other;

\- Boost/give privilege their own apps;

\- Limited support/response, most of the times automated, disregarding the investment and commitment people took on their market place;

</comment><comment><USER45> What a time to be alive... Microsoft calling for anti-trust action. Oh how the tables have turned.

</comment><comment><USER46> App stores on the desktop are nowhere as close to their mobile counterparts. Web versions of mobile apps exist, but people always choose to go with the native versions. While on desktops, the opposite is true. I've always wondered why that is the case.

</comment><comment><USER47> Apple could allow alternative app store which then can be permanently banned if any of the app distributed via it contains malware/adware or privacy issues

</comment><comment><USER48> They mean the Xbox store, right? Gonna let steam be an alternative way to distribute games on my Xbox?

</comment><comment><USER49> Maybe when Microsoft implements a decent app store then they could speak about other appstores?

<comment><USER50> iOS doesn't allow sideloading, and the only available store takes 30% from developers, that is anti-competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> One good thing with app store tax is that more apps will consider being web apps instead.

</comment><comment><USER52> I agree Apple is abusive here.

There is also a very valid counterargument. Apple maintain the quality of apps on their app story by being a censor.

There are a lot of ways to scam people or bug their devices, and by and large Apple also create a sufficiently safe environment for iOS users.

There do seem to be two aspects in conflict, but good for DHH for kicking this off. 30% is obcene.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is this coming up because their app store didn't work very well?

</comment><comment><USER54> Walmart called on regulators to do the dirty work of controlling how Target negotiates the sale of shelf space within its walls.

"As one of the largest retailers in the world, making billions each year in profit, it's unconscionable if we sat by not calling out others for doing the same."

Walmart continued, "It's imperative that we sully our competitions brand to make gains in the financial markets. Without state backed protectionism for large enterprises, us Barons are really just being hung out to dry."

Walmart has continued to profit mightily, but it says the complaint is predicated on the fact they could be profiting MORE if someone forced Target to behave more like the rest of the majority.

When asked if Walmart had considered rebuilding its own image to gain business, there was a pause, before the conversation returned to targeting Target.

Walmart blew of criticism it's used the market to wipe out competition in the past. When asked why they simply don't do that to Target they replied, "Target is too big financially. So we need a bigger bully they can't damage in return to stand up for us gritty, ruggedly individual elites. It's the story of humanity to build government that's coddles and pampers a privileged minority. It should be no different now."

When it was suggested the public should advocate for dissolution of middlemen landlords in general, rather than drag the public courts through a pissing contest between blowhards, and stop wasting its precious time resource arbitrating the concerns of petty rich guys, the room laughed.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is a great example about why despite the self-interested crying and whining, the App Store policy is a good thing.

Why does Microsoft care about this? They have the market power to negotiate better terms. The answer is simple -- they want to reassert control over email. The Outlook app no longer uses ActiveSync, and Microsoft architects usually imply or state outright that ActiveSync is a legacy product.

The MS client stack has a weaker technology advantage than it ever had. AD was the great anchor of enterprises, and it is eroding slowly as things shift to cloud. (Remember, enteprises are a decade behind startups) The whole point of moving away from open email protocols is that things like access control that enterprises need must use Azure AD. That drives deeper entrenchment in MS SKUs and drives products like ATP, Dynamics, the MS Voice stack, etc. Better PR/branding aside, Microsoft is more like 1995 Microsoft than ever.

You can see over the years, Microsoft has bolted all sorts of mobile user experiences over traditional Exchange/SharePoint/etc. Teams was the first one that has had staying power. They can't add functionality to the mail/messaging/video/collaboration stack unless they break legacy.

It would be really awful if Apple caved, and 80% of the commercial email market became a walled garden of a historically hostile platform owner, all so that Basecamp can make a few bucks selling an email client.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my Startup - imVOX - <AUTHOR> http://imvox.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an apology to make. I submitted this about a month or two ago, and of course sent it to the people in my company to see the feedback.

Unfortunately, I was still in the process of training them for how to interact with the community at the time and three of them thought it best to come in with shill comments and not identifying themselves as with the company- thinking that this was about promoting the company, not feedback. This was highly embarrassing to me, because I made the poor assumption that everyone understood the proper etiquette on social networking sites. But that wasn't the case.

The thread was (rightfully) locked and removed from the listings, just as I would have done as a community manager if someone was shilling on my site. I'd like to try again and not repeat the same mistakes.

I deeply am sorry for this transgression and they will not be posting here again in such a way.

</comment><comment><USER2> I read every word on your website:

Unlimited FREE Voice Social Networking integration No Subscription Fees Blazing fast servers & superior sound performance Download and Chat No Fees, No Cost, No Worries! Supports: Windows XP, Vista,7 Password secured servers and channels Customizable backgrounds Superior Audio Quality Voice normalization Easy to use, clean interface

And I still wonder: What is it about? Is it something like skype? Im not a skype user so even if it is - I would still not be sure what it is.

<comment><USER3> I didn't read every word on the site, and I had similar comprehension problems.

I think it's some kind of voip conference-room alternative with plans for a darth vader voice changing button.

Maybe it's like gotomeeting but with an audio quality like google chat, and for video games.

Also, this:

[http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-8076995-sexy- headphon...](http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-8076995-sexy- headphones.php)

threw me off. The headphones are very confusing.

<comment><USER4> Right, I got the feeling that there were some common use cases, especially around gaming. I'd like for those to be spelled out explicitly. The copy is very heavy on features of the product but could use a lot more copy about me, the potential user. What will I use it for? How will my life be better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd change "Unlimited FREE Voice" to "Unlimited FREE Voice Chat". I wasn't sure what the site did right away.

I'd also add a link to the pricing page. I was on the Features page and wanted to know what the pro plan offered by I didn't want to click on the Download link because it said download and had a price on it. I did click it though and it took me to the download page, which is also the pricing page. Maybe separate the two or label it some sort of hybrid?

I do like the design overall. The testimonials on the download page are good for me, because I'm a nerd. If that's your target demographic then awesome, but if not then I'd try to find some testimonials that will appeal to the layman.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. I like the colors just the way they are, the blues, greens and grays, etc. I also like the female face with the headphones, I hope you own the image because it could be a strong brand image for you. She is very unique with the green eyes, green headphones and tattoos on her fingers and wrists.

2\. I wonder, and probably others will wonder what those tattoos say or are, so maybe you could play it up a little and put something about it in your FAQ's as a marketing angle to set your business off from the competition as hip, cool and unique. Think about what your target market would find memorable about this.

3\. Some say they think the site is ugly, interestingly I do not think it is ugly, in fact I like it a lot. The fonts, colors, pics, etc., really seem to work for me. If you are shooting for a big time corporate look like some of Version's or Sprints pages I think you have come pretty close, an 8.5 out of 10. I agree with some of the suggestions about having a designer look at it and suggest improvements, but if it were my site I would limit those changes to small customer tested iterations in layout vs. color and content.

4\. My test of your site was if I were looking for a product of your type, based on this website would I personally trust the download enough to give it a try. My answer based on your website is 98% yes. Meaning if I were a potential customer I would download, set it up and give it a try, yes without a doubt I would. Then providing the product was a better than the competition I would keep it--sale made. So as far as the site goes you could change it, pretty it up with different colors ect., but that might change my personal decision to download, but I am only one person and the site needs to be tested in live commerce still, so do iterate and test.

5\. The _Features_ page has a display problem on my big monitor with IE 7.0.5730.11. The four boxes on the right are lined up 50% on top of the text on the left. Also the text in the bottom box is displaying outside the bottom of the box.

A tip: If you're using an x-y-z style of coding with layers or something similar, sometimes the older non-layer style (x-y) will be more cross browser compatible with less work.

6\. If you are not already using banner ads, personally I think the site is good enough to spend banner ad promotion money on right now. If it were my site and ad money I would start a banner ad campaign right now if you think the product is ready to release to the public. Just iterate the site slowly with only very minor changes, and then test the changes on actual click through customers with an A-control site and a B-iterated site setup to see if the changes make any difference in amount of downloads between the two sites.

7\. I would make the link to Green Ear more prominent and play it up a lot more. it will add gravitas to the product and possibly increase downloads.

</comment><comment><USER7> No offence, but the site is just ugly, you should redesign it ASAP. Seriously! The product looks pretty interesting though. Doesn't Skype more-less provide these services?

<comment><AUTHOR> Skype is rather similar in some ways and we often look at them as a role model. Skype is much more CPU/memory/bandwidth intensive and lacks some of the gaming-centric functionality that we're integrating. Also, Skype user conferences don't scale over 8-users, which is a barrier for many massive gamers.

I agree on the site. We've got a new 'look' that we have deployed on a landing page and we're hoping to roll out site-wide soon with some additional revisions ([http://imvox.com/warcraft_ventrilo_hosting_voice_chat_altern...](http://imvox.com/warcraft_ventrilo_hosting_voice_chat_alternative.php)). Any parts particularly offensive on the current one (or future) that I can pass along to our designer?

<comment><USER8> I like the new site better than the current one, but it still needs work. Some general comments about both:

Width: To accommodate (almost) everything, most designers keep things to a maximum width of 960px. Your site is 1100px wide. On most sites I'd say this is an issue, because unless you specifically _want_ horizontal scrolling it's a bad idea. Since your site is targeted towards gamers, they might all have monitors that wide--I don't know. I'd take a look at your analytics and make sure that's a safe width. I'll note that even if it is ok it _feels_ really wide. Your designer's done a decent job of keeping it under control from what I can see, but recognize that text that stretches across the whole width is not at all readable.

Navigation mouseovers: right now when you mouse over your navigation links, they turn blue and get underlined. The dark blue is hard to see on both sites, and the effect just seems unrelated to anything else on the page. Do one or the other. For the color, I'd go with either the same color as the 'current page' link, or something halfway in between the two. I normally prefer the latter, but you do have to make sure that the difference is enough to be very easily noticeable.

Some comments on the new design, specifically: First, I'd like to say that this is _much_ better in general. It still needs work, but it's much improved.

A few relatively minor about the top section:

The baseline of the text in the logo should probably align with the baseline of the navigation link text. (I'd cut out some of the shadow or make it fade more quickly so it fits there.)

The switch to a serif face for your 'sales pitch' is good--it draws attention to it, and that's what you want. I would recommend getting a little more creative with font choices than Times New Roman though!

The snowflakes don't make much sense to me--I just don't know why they're there. It might look better than with a plain or gradient background anyway, but finding something a little more topical might be a good idea.

I see what you're trying to do with the computer, but right now it's drawing attention away from your software and putting it on the computer. I think just a screenshot of your software could be much better.

The bottom part I think needs some new ideas. It's too same-y (and a bit messy) and my eyes get lost. More visual differentiation would be a good thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. The snowflakes were in there from the holidays and we're pulling those as soon as I get around to it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ok, I disagree with most of what you see below.

1) I had no problem understanding what the site is for. It's clearly VOIP for social networking, and the colorscheme and design indicates it's aimed at gamers. Further reading supports that.

2) I'd put this in the category of "attractive, professional looking". You've met the minimum required "attractiveness quotient", now it's time to focus on your core business value and customer acquisition / support.

That said, here are a couple design tweaks I did notice (OSX 10.5.8, FF3.5.7, btw):

1) The footer height is standard on all pages except the home page, where it is substantially taller.

2) On the home page, the "Unlimited free voice" is very visible, but the "Social networking integration" blends in. I would suggest making the latter more dramatic, and possibly changing it to "gaming" or something like that if that really is your primary market.

3) On the FAQ page, the hover color and the selected color for the question links is the same, which is confusing.

And a structure issue:

1) Right now, the FAQ page requires actively clicking on a question to make its text appear. Much better is to have the links jump you down the page; this makes it much more likely that people will read all the FAQs, which gives you better educated customers and fewer customer support issues.

Good luck with it!

</comment><comment><USER10> From a design perspective, I would suggest the use of softer colors. The current blues and greens used look like (cheap) neon lights.

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree about clarity. The headphones image makes me initially think music service with social features, and I felt like I had to interpret all the bullet points just to figure out what it was.

The logo is a little distracting. Am I missing the connection of what the orange circle/triangle mark is supposed to suggest? Plus your eye tends to follow triangles (arrows), and this one is leading to left into nothing.

The screen shot is nice, and the colors and the design of the UI look like much better choices than the dated blues and greens.

FAQ is your best page- clear and focused. The features is too distracted by the right column. Does download need a testimonials column that looks so similar to the two download packages?

I know this has nothing to do with the product itself, but we all know marketing is just as (more?) critical.

</comment><comment><USER12> The look and feel of the landing page, the woman's photo, and the GUI screenshot give me the first impression that this is some type of professional audio software (like Audition).

Keep in mind, though, that I'm not in your target audience, which appears to be gamers.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have no idea what imVOX is from visiting the landing page. Looking at the menu, I don't see any menu option which will explain this to me, so I try FAQ. Based on the first question answered there, I still don't know what imVOX as except that it's like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. I don't know what those are either, so I'm probably not your target audience.

I think you could be a lot better at telling a story, at guiding people like me through your website in such a way that I leave thinking "wow, that is cool -- but I don't need it", instead of what happens now, where I have no clue what you're doing, will not be telling anyone about your service/product even though I may have friends who would find it useful.

</comment><comment><USER14> Agree with most other guys here. What is it? I have no clue what this program/service is and I'm not gonna download it and figure it out. Some clarity on the front page is needed without doubt. I think the site looks cool so I don't think a change of color is needed.

</comment><comment><USER15> The client has a few but very important shortcomings like being unable to set what to alert for via text-to-speech, also one cannot set the volume neither of said text nor for anything else. The user-interface seems a bit off to me, with that annoying background and other elements, but I'm a minimalist kind of guy but I do find it usable. Also the feature to "mask" your voice is not at all highly regarded by me, especially if it cannot be disabled globally on my side as it is usually more annoying than funny. The website serves it's purpose but yes, what the others said about instant clarity what the site is about would help.

</comment><comment><USER16> The website probably needs a redesign for various reasons, but in the meantime you should know that in IE7, the text in the features page is partially hidden by the blocks on the right. It's a serious flaw that severely impairs the respectability of your website (makes it look cheap).

</comment><comment><USER17> I am skeptical of using products when it's not clear how they make money.

If you give everything away for free, when will it stop being free? When will the bait and switch occur?

If everything truly is free, how long will you be around?

<comment><USER18> They have a pro version, which costs money.

<http://imvox.com/download.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The photo you chose for the home page gives the impression that this site is for something other than what it is. I figured this was a music service of some sort and then I realized it was for communications after reading more.</comment>


Measure your latency to GCP regions - <AUTHOR> http://www.gcping.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> source available at [https://github.com/imjasonh/gcping](https://github.com/imjasonh/gcping)</comment>


Lessons learned in building RQ - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/nvie/lessons-learned-in-building-rq

<comment><USER2> RQ is cool but it's not fair to say that celery is complicated, if you use redis rather than rabbitMQ then celery is just as easy to set up and has all the features RQ wants to add in 0.4 and 0.5</comment>


How I stopped procrastinating, learned to code, and launched my first product - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@lynnetye/how-i-went-from-indie-lurker-to-indie-hacker-d1042ffa5f <comment><USER2> Thank you for that post ! It answered some questions and corrected some misconceptions I had.

I wish you the best for the rest of your adventure :)

<comment><AUTHOR> If it was helpful for one person, it was worth writing :)</comment></comment>


The 2017 iPad Pros - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/the_2017_ipad_pros <comment><USER2> To me, the fundamental question remains this: what platform is the next web browser, BitTorrent, or BitCoin going to be invented on?

I posit that while the iPad remains a closed platform, it will _never_ become the computer of the future, no matter how many pro features Apple adds. In a few years, I expect Apple pundits to be making the same "how were we so wrong on the iPad" articles that they were in 2016.

No doubt, the hardware here is certainly exciting. Many people can make full use of it for their careers. But it won't send ripples through the fabric of society like the humble PC does every 5-10 years.

<comment><USER3> Does it matter if a platform does the inventing? The web browser was invented on a NeXT Cube but that didn't limit its eventual use.

<comment><USER2> No, I don't think that matters. However, I see the walled garden as a much bigger issue. Apple wouldn't let a new, disruptive technology along the lines of browsers/bittorrent/bitcoin into its App Store unless it already had widespread adoption. If most people replace their open PCs with closed phones or tablets, that's never going to happen. It's a giant bollard in the path of technological progress.

Fortunately, it looks like the open-ish Android model is winning out. Maybe Apple will change their mind at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So how much does Gruber get paid to write these adver... err... I mean reviews?

</comment><comment><USER5> I would love to see one day iPad Pros with the capability of being plugged into an external GPU and running desktop-grade applications instead of the meek productivity tools that the Apple App Store is constrained to. As a college student, I recently bought an iPad to take notes, and the one thing that's stopping me from selling my laptop is the lack of connectivity and full MacOS. But then where's the future of MacBooks if tablets overtake them in utility?

<comment><USER6> This product already exists, its called Microsoft SurfaceBook. The screen works as a detachable tablet, the keyboard contains more battery and a relatively powerful GPU.

It is also expensive as hell.

<comment><USER7> The SurfaceBook should be thought of as a _laptop_ and not a tablet imo. I have the surface pro and it a _terrible_ tablet. Well, it's good if you are an artist and doing sketches/artwork but not for the casual programmer. I've used tablet mode under 10 times (I have a nexus 7 which is much better as a tablet) and was unimpressed every time.

<comment><USER6> This just shows that a laptop is much better suited for programming than a tablet. Not a huge surprise really. Rudy Huyn uses a Surface Pro for development. I highly doubt he has even once started Visual Studio in tablet mode.

But back to OP, he clearly stated that he wanted to run desktop grade software. I think SurfaceBook fits his requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mildly amusing is how everyone else is wrong until Apple does it.

If you're going to use these things with a keyboard and like it then why was Microsoft so roundly mocked for championing touch screen laptops in the first place?

<comment><USER9> Because outside of the home screen and poorly maintained touch-optimized apps most software for Windows is still designed for using with a mouse. iOS is inherently less capable than Windows, but is much better for touch, and all apps are geared towards that.

I was skeptical a few years ago, but I think iOS's productivity potential is growing faster than Windows "Cool Factor", efficiency, and portability are improving.

<comment><USER8> I get that Apple has much more touch optimized software.

But aren't they effectively building the same toaster/fridge they mocked just a few years ago?

I was listening to a recent ATP podcast and they were going on about how nobody really wants to touch their laptop screen, but in order for an iPad to be a "pro" device you will realistically have to use it with a keyboard and...touch your screen.

The two companies are converging on the exact same thing yet one is considered ingenious and the other clueless.

<comment><USER10> Tablet with keyboard ≠ laptop with touchscreen

I used a succession of iPads as my main productivity computing devices between 20013 and 2016 and despite my general satisfaction I found I really needed a 'proper' computer (a much-derided but perfectly adequate "single port MacBook") last year for the sake of writing a business plan. Right after that Apple released the iPad Pro and I've been using that intensively (but no longer exclusively) since April last year. I'll be upgrading to the 10.5 inch because iOS11 seems to deserve top-level hardware. I'm really convinced that for non-development use an iPad is an extraordinarily capable device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does it work with a mouse? One of the most important client applications for me is an RDP connection to a VDI machine on Windows.

<comment><USER12> While I'm not so interested in mouse support, I am intrigued on the UX with RDP apps. My next device will either be a new Surface Pro or an iPad Pro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Damn, now that's a glowing review. I might have to check one of these out.

<comment><USER14> 99% of John Gruber posts are glowing reviews of Apple products. His blog is essentially promotional material for Apple. I'm not sure why people post his articles here.

<comment><USER15> Eh, he'd referred to Apple serving a shit sandwich before. So he can be critical.</comment></comment></comment>


Physicists reverse time using quantum computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-03/miop-prt031119.php <comment><USER2> The underlying paper is also discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567)

(Side note: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.10057](https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.10057) is not yet crossrefered, but the "community-canonical" open access verison of [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40765-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40765-6))

Such things are not surprising at the quantum scale: Our standard model of particle physics is invariant under time reversal. However, reversing time on the macroscopical scale is prohibited by thermodynamical and causal arguments and (still?) experimentally inaccessible.</comment>


A response to "Why you can't be a good .NET developer" (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://ayende.com/blog/174433/re-why-you-cant-be-a-good-net-developer <comment><USER2> From the original post:

> This is why you can't be a good .NET developer, sooner or later the > frustration sets in and you go and do something better. The average ability > and desire for something better just keeps on plummetting whilst Microsoft > try to chase the brain drain by casting little nuggets of mediocrity at the > people left behind scrabbling in the mud.

This was exactly my progression when working .NET in 'Derpy Enterprise Shops'. I don't think it necessarily kept me from becoming a good .NET developer.. But eventually I grew cynical and tired and just gave up on the entire stack. That delta between what we were doing vs could be doing felt like it was too big.

In the end though, its absolutely about culture and Enterprise IT will suffocate you no matter what language.

<comment><USER3> I really can't echo this sentiment enough. You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. Did someone build a cross-platform game using Xamarin Forms and Azure Service Fabric? That sounds cool, sign me up! Then you walk into your day job, and it's building yet another "textbox over database site" with ASP.NET 4.5.2 and Bootstrap.

Where can one find these .NET shops that strive to make use of the latest developments?

<comment><USER4> I feel like there is not enough "interesting" work to go around. Maybe more experimental work is seen as less likely to be profitable or too risky to implement?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder sometimes if, in the quest to make things "interesting" again, we fall into the trap of making the uninteresting things so damned complicated that we find that scut work foisted back on us, because the tooling has become to complex.

As I survey the mess of JS and transpilers and server-side technologies that have amassed themselves before me, to do the same thing that a Visual Basic Forms app could do 20 years ago, sometime I weep and gnash my teeth a little bit.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, we may be doing interesting work horizontally, reimplementing things that have already been solved. (Maybe this is natural in the evolution of things, searching for a breakthrough.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is Enterprise not .Net. I have the freedom to pick whatever technology I please as long as I deliver a product that works within the specifications of my customers and I find there is a place for for example ASP.Net MVC API's written in C# or Windows services written in F# even when given a complete free choice.

Sometimes I pick PHP as "must run anywhere" is the requirement. The next day I'll pick Swift or Objective-C because it's something Apple related. But .Net is always a possibility.

But yet while nobody really _forces_ me to use a .Net stack I still pick it since the stack is really stable and relatively easy to use (compared to the perpetual change and chaos of a Modern Web Stack for example). Something I've written 4 years ago will still run and compile like yesterday even if I've abandoned it in the mean while.

I've been in those soulless Enterprise shops and it's just what happens to places where people go everyday to watch the clock go six about 28 times per month so they'll see the number on their bank account grow with a predictable number every time.

But somewhere in the world these places exist full of PHP developers or Java developers. The thing with Java or .Net is that some customers have really old stacks and don't want to change anything. It's the new Cobol for some companies while other companies do really cool cross-platform stuff. It can be both. Take care where you take your resumé since the cool jobs are much harder to find since nobody with a living soul wants that kind of enterprise jobs.

<comment><USER6> You made the point I wanted to make. The problem is Enterprise, not a framework.

I'll admit--the Microsoft stack is a walled garden. It offers some nice features like Visual Studio integrating with Visual Studio Team Services with its own issue tracker and build server and so on. If Microsoft supports your workflow or integrates with the tooling you like, awesome. If not, well, just wait and hope that it will someday support what you're looking for.

 _That_ is the frustrating part of the Microsoft stack. It can be overcome with some architecture decisions at the outset of the project. You don't have to stay in the walled garden.

But the Enterprise is where innovation dies. The Enterprise is where motivated developers' souls are sucked out as they are told "no" constantly.

.NET isn't the problem.

<comment><USER7> But .net is inherently enterprisey. You have to license all the things you're using, or did until recently - Visual Studio, SQL Server... you may not have to pay if you're a small business or whatever but it's always going to be a lot more effort than just clicking download. That has a chilling effect on people using these technologies for the side projects that become productive small businesses, and it compounds because if no-one's using that stack in these places then there's no open-source library ecosystem because there's no- one to create that.

<comment><USER8> No different than the Java shops I've seen.

<comment><USER7> Very different in my experience; there's a lot more on maven central, because the toolchain and other popular components (e.g. mariadb) are freely available, so you can very easily spin up the same environment at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it bizarre that the problems of enterprise software development are being blamed on a technology stack. _Any_ technology stack.

I'm primarily a small company kind of guy but I've done a couple of big enterprise gigs now. Currently I'm working for a large multi-national retailer and... well, it doesn't bring me a lot of joy. And why is that? Well, not because we're using .NET, although we are, and not because I'm surrounded by "derpy enterprise developers", because I'm not. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest I'm in a derp free zone, yet it's still hard to get anything productive done.

Why is that? Well, here are a few issues:

\- Culture,

\- Politics and egos,

\- Legacy - just tons and tons of legacy,

\- Complex business requirements, often poorly or incompletely understood by everyone involved,

\- Distributed teams,

\- Sheer weight of numbers in terms of people and projects (remember Fred Brooks),

\- Meetings, meetings, meetings,

\- BAU,

\- I could go on.

The current choice of technology stack doesn't even factor into the equation.

Legacy itself is a complex issue that goes way beyond technological concerns and can cut right through to how the business makes money at a fundamental level.

<comment><USER10> I find it bizarre that the original blog entry was seen to be blaming the technology, quite the inverse in fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assumed that .NET shops sucked, as did a lot of my peers at university. Then I started working at one, and found that C# is a nice language, Visual Studio + Resharper is a joy, and that if you follow sensible architectural patterns you can write clean and elegant code.

Everything sucks if you do it badly.

<comment><USER12> C# is a great language. I should think so--I've been writing it for twelve years, I don't write C# professionally but I pay for ReSharper, and I used to be a _huge_ Mono booster back-in-the-day. I even did Google Summer of Code for them and made friends I've kept ever since. But whole I've consulted for .NET shops, I've very deliberately avoided working for them for a lot of the reasons described in the article to which this one replies.

It's not .NET. It's the mentality of so very many of the shops that _pick_ .NET. The stack and the tooling and the nigh-inevitable process pile-on apply what I feel is more or less a band-pass filter on your output. It's relatively hard to write really stinky code. But it's also relatively hard to write great code. That's not a C# thing--you can write great, brilliant, interesting, smart C#! But doing so at a ".NET shop" strikes me as profoundly unlikely. I have yet to see one, parts of Microsoft aside, that seems to actively reward being smart and curious and expansive in your skill set--and I think a lot of it is because you're a .NET shop, the batteries are included, stay in your lane.

(The same criticisms apply to Java-not-Kotlin-or-Scala shops; fair is fair.)

<comment><USER13> > But it's also relatively hard to write great code.

What's the definition of great code? In all the languages and platforms that I know (C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, C#, etc) if someone wanted me to write "great code" without any other qualifiers I'd pick C# for the job. It's just such a nice well designed static language (except for nullable references) with a reasonably well designed framework that producing great code is pretty easy.

I'm patiently waiting for Microsoft to get .NET on everything but for now it seems like JavaScript is the king of that goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm using C#/.NET 4.5.2 for the first time at a small startup. The original architect came from a bank. He's a fantastic programmer and he organized the code in a logical, easy-to-maintain way.

Still, we spend about 30% of our working time (30%!) fighting the tooling. Visual Studio 2015 is a buggy mess, and 2017 wouldn't even build our projects. Everything happens at a snail's pace and is incredibly complicated.

The error messages are opaque to the point of making me laugh out loud at times, and doing even tiny things (like changing the status code of the response in the API) is complicated and hidden away under many layers of magic.

Don't even get me started on Entity Framework. What a fucking disaster. When it works, it's amazing! When it doesn't work (or when you need to do something simple, like _update a row_ ) it becomes a black swamp of meaningless error messages and trial-and-error frustration. Our most experienced engineers have been working with .NET and EF for many years and _still_ couldn't figure out how to do an update (in one particular case). The solution? Write a raw SQL query with a "TODO: use EF" comment added. Time lost? TEN hours. I'm not even kidding.

Maybe people who like .NET have never had a better experience, but I can assure you that even with great engineers at a small shop, it is not even close to the best experience. Comparisons to Java are accurate.

<comment><USER15> For anyone that might not be familiar, Entity Framework is an ORM (object- relational mapper). The "blessed" way of doing an update is to retrieve an object from your context, change its properties, and call SaveChanges on the context. Yes, this can be terribly inefficient, particularly if you're trying to update many rows at once. But it works okay for single-row updates in a CRUD app at the expense of having to run the SELECT first plus all the reflection and change tracking.

If you want to do fast, single-call updates without first doing a SELECT, or updates on just a few of the row's columns, since that can't easily be done with tracked objects, you're swimming upstream against what ORMs are designed to do and so your best option is to get out of ORM land and do a SQL query. Using context.Database.SqlQuery() or another library for these purposes like Dapper to parameterize your queries via reflection could help here.

<comment><USER16> _IF_ you have the primary key of the entity that you want to update, EF allow you to attach it to the context without querying the database. After attaching it to the context, you can set the new values, mark them as modified and (finally!) call SaveChanges.

\---

I do agree with you though! Dealing with it's limitations and edge case mean, sooner or later, falling back to SQL.

EF is (imho) very hard to master and very easy to use "badly".

</comment></comment></comment><comment> UK-AL "Tangible examples? I remember well the insistence of one boss that we use TFS because some developers would find it hard to use git. I remember the steadfast committal to ASP.NET web forms because the "new concepts" in ASP.NET MVC were going to take too long for the team to become productive in."

I've gotten this on EVERY stack. Not just .net.

I thinks it's more do with age of the project your working on. There is tons critical business applications in .net and java and they don't want to break anything and prefer stability.

If your developing something new, the technology is up for grabs.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, it's definitely a culture problem, not a platform problem.

<comment><USER18> The culture that leads to Cobol programs running banks with expiring developers.

<comment><USER19> How exactly would you rewrite a 10M-line codebase in a new language, without any sort of bugs?

More importantly, how would you convince management to allow you to do so?

<comment><USER18> That's the whole point: you shouldn't get into this situation in the first place, and the reason you did is that you've got a culture of short-termism that doesn't place enough weight on maintainability. This disaster's been 40 years in the making, and everyone thinks they made the right call.

I have exactly zero solutions to this. If I did I would be rich beyond the dreams of Bezos. But let's not pretend that this isn't the end game of a short-term, low investment, low innovation culture.

<comment><USER19> A culture of short-termism isn't the problem here. The problem is that the business rules that the code needs to implement are ridiculously complex.

Keep in mind that the sort of organizations that use large Cobol systems (e.g. banks) are typically subject to very large amounts of regulation. Their code has to meet all the relevant regulations at all times, plus handle internal business rules.

The laws for all of the regions a large bank works in would likely be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. There isn't a way to condense that into a small amount of elegant code.

<comment><USER18> Well, it pretty much is. Everyone's concerned with how many eggs they're dealing with. But the basket's falling apart. It's not like we haven't already had situations where banks have found themselves completely unable to process payments for weeks at a time. And it's only going to get worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Having worked at an enterprise company that used Go, Node, and Scala, let me tell you .Net isn't the problem.

The .Net stack is wonderful. The tooling is fantastic. The base libraries are robust, well documented, and broad. And most projects are pretty consistent.

And when the enterprise abandoned this for less mature stacks they magnified all of these typical enterprise problems. Because simply trying to debug poorly written C# is orders of magnitude easier than poorly written JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure why there's such a harsh reaction to "developers that just want a job." I used to enjoy programming. I still enjoy learning new things. I have a life outside of work. Why isn't 23.8% of my life not good enough?

</comment><comment><USER22> Rob Ashton on .NET: "you're working on a platform that is primarily used by derpy enterprise shops, you will continually be held back because those derpy enteprise shops are continually be held back by the derpy enterprise developers that work in the derpy enterprise shops."

Can we just ignore this guy now?

<comment><USER18> The irony being, Oren clearly doesn't ignore Rob, since he's paid him a fair bit to work on Raven over the years.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I also like how he bashed C# because he used inheritence in Raven and now has problems.

Like you can't do composition in C#. You can't blame language for your shitty design!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's not C# (as a language), which is benign and a good actor in the set, it's the stack. Ever try running a Windows / IIS and SQL Server stack in the cloud -- do it only if you want to lose sleep nights and spend weekends away from the family. The language is fine... Let's hope the move to Core and Linux will take the language and the .NET technology to a better platform, but right now? It's a disaster as a robust Cloud platform.

Windows and IIS is simply a BAD, BAD, BAD server technology as a whole. It's ill-equipped to to be robust and fault tolerant. Its simply the weak part of that .NET narrative, no way around it right now...

<comment><USER25> Just tried it a few months ago, deploying a new project to Azure.

Best experience I've had deploying to the cloud - maybe 10 minutes of work, mostly getting acquainted with azure cloud.

Beats Heroku's plugin/cli/github flow and AWS' configure 50 tools process hands down.

It really only works with .net, visual studio and sqlserver. But really that is what you want if you are a .net developer.

<comment><USER24> Azure is built for Windows, I hope it works well. However, I'm sorry... there's no way you're going to convince me of Windows as a "stack" is more reliable and robust, or even as scalable (in concurrent users and cost) than another stack like GoLang, Node, Python, Elixir... nope. Not going to agree with that man, I've been around much too long to see bullshit issues with Windows/IIS take town a whole operation based on SIMPLE issues -- hell IIS alone is a reason not to choose Microsoft as a stack, it's a DOG WITH FLEAS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I worked about a year writing desktop software in C#. Probably the most fun period of my carrier, we were getting things done and delivering before schedule while all having a great time.

Also, I get this feeling that the original poster (Rob) is the kind of guy who has zero experience outside a few web frameworks. The kind of guy that barely even knows that desktop, server and embedded exist.

<comment><USER27> _Also, I get this feeling that the original poster (Rob) is the kind of guy who has zero experience outside a few web frameworks. The kind of guy that barely even knows that desktop, server and embedded exist._

I think these kinds of disparaging remarks about people don't belong in a civil discussion. If you feel that the opinion isn't worth being discussed, you can just not comment.

<comment><USER26> No, I don't feel this was a disparaging remark about a person.

A guy makes a huge claim based on his very limited view of the market (while insulting everybody). I think I am in my full right to call him out.

<comment><USER28> It's not about your "full right". It's about whether or not it leads to civil discussion.

The biggest problem with discourse is that we think we know what the other person is thinking.

<comment><USER26> Fair enough, I will try to remember that next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Blogger 1 makes overreaching claim when talking about a general trend. Blogger 2 focuses on the overreaching claim and mostly ignores the overall point.

Sigh. This kind of arguments is way too common.

<comment><USER29> > Blogger 1 makes overreaching claim when talking about a general trend. > Blogger 2 focuses on the overreaching claim and mostly ignores the overall > point. Commenter uses the opportunity to express his superiority above both > sides.

FTFY

<comment><USER30> Stack overflow.

At least it is tail recursion, though.

<comment><USER29> I actually expected someone else to do another FTFY by adding "Second commenter takes discussion to the meta level."

<comment><USER31> Last comment in thread compares HN to Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've switched to node platform in the last year, but I've done .NET since 2002. I can still build a solid site in wayyyyy less time in .NET/C# than in node. I still think .NET MVC web apps are a modern marvel. I have yet to do/see anything on the node platform that comes close.

<comment><USER33> Can you point to a good intro to .NET/C# web dev guide. Basically how to go from zero to a minimal REST API that can talk to a database in a modern way. Ideally something that that doesn't assume IIS (or even windows)

<comment><USER34> [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/aspnet/core/tutorials/web-a...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/aspnet/core/tutorials/web-api-vsc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Rob is not wrong in my experience. Contracting in London doing .NET stuff means 9 times out of 10 you're at some enterprise place with stupid rules and processes that ultimately make it less fun than it should be and you end up hating them for it.

Nothing to do with the language/framework, but its adopters.

</comment><comment><USER36> I love C#, .Net for server side work. My old project was C# servers on Windows Servers and it worked great. I much prefer to C# to Java & Python which is what I do now, I'd even go so far to say as our Windows Blades were more reliable and easier to maintain than our current Linux ones.

The biggest problem with .NET and why I switched is that Linux is free and now has biggest mindshare. Most free and opensource products really are Linux first platforms.

It used to be that you couldn't get fired for choosing Microsoft, but its flipped that free software is so good you feel silly paying for commercial products like Windows.

I can't see much future for the Windows platform which is why I changed. So I think the headline is wrong - any good developer can be happy in C# and write great .net apps - so the good .NET developer does exist. But its also kinda true because the balance has shifted and great new applications are now on new platforms.

<comment><USER26> Isn't .NET Core a viable option on Linux these days?

<comment><USER37> It's getting there. It should be production ready this autumn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The original article is really a diatribe on enterprise shops disguised as a critique of .NET. Anyone who has ever worked in a large, enterprise company knows that it's all about warm bodies in seats. The environment selects for people that want stability and runs off ambitious people who want to do "cool" things. .NET is actually a pretty good framework for building apps and is certainly no worse than J2EE or stack du joir for building SPAs.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'll refer to patio11's legendary blog post [1] (Don't call yourself a programmer) by saying don't be just a .NET developer. C# is a great language, but you know, so are Python, Swift, Go, Elixir to name a few, and are even easier to learn/practice. By staying exclusively committed to a single language/framework, you're missing out on a lot of fun. The initial productivity anxiety usually wears off after a couple weeks.

[1] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a- pro...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)

<comment><USER40> Knowing the language grammar and semantics is one thing.

Knowing the language grammar and semantics, standard library, good quality third party libraries, database drivers, official build tools, IDE and VIM/Emacs plugins, best practices, main blogs,tooling for native applications, tooling for web applications, backend servers, .... is another matter altogether.

Now multiply this per each language.

I rather constrain myself to JVM/.NET stacks, with a little C++ on the side for pure native stuff. That is already a lot to keep on my head.

Everything else is nice to dabble on rainy weekends, but that is about it.

<comment><USER41> I'm curious, as a long time emacs lover now doing C# work in a day job... is there a good way to do C# in emacs? I'm quite happy with VS2015+ReSharper, but I do sometimes long for emacs.

<comment><USER40> Being an IDE person, I never bothered searching for C# on Emacs.

I am an Emacs person regarding Emacs vs VI debate, and got to learn how to use it quite well back in the day (actually XEmacs), but it was only as a workaround for lack of nice IDEs in UNIX.

Nowadays I seldom use it.

EDIT: I guess Omnisharp plugs into Emacs as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> When Paul Graham writes about Lisp as a "secret weapon" I often wonder that .NET is that "secret weapon".

C# is absolutely powerful and the ecosystem is such that you can actually work on your startup and not on fixing a web of broken NPM packages. Admittedly this doesn't give you GitHub "points", but hey, there is .NET Core for that now, usually as broken as JS stack and just about as fun if getting bogged down in months old but already deprecated functions is your kind of fun.

.NET makes a ton of sense to use for a startup but that's the space where it is severely underused mostly for fashion reasons (and because it doesn't run on MacBooks).

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a culture problem, not a platform problem, and the problem isn't with .NET shops per se, but with enterprise shops that [treat programmers as fungible cogs][0]. Language enters into that _to some extent_ , because this kind of shop wants programmers with a certain baseline of skill in a widely used language with a widely used stack, and Java and .NET fit the bill. But there's no reason you can't do interesting stuff with good methodology in those languages...if you're not trying to do it at one of those shops.

[0]: [http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69](http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69)

</comment><comment><USER43> Person 1: Because a lot of .NET teams are like...

Person 2: Wrong! Because not all .NET teams are like that.

<comment><USER44> The problem is the generalization over the stack instead of the type of company.

<comment><USER43> Agreed. I'm not aware of any language/stack you can't be a great dev in. Slash has said that although he has favorite guitars, he believes a good guitarist can grab any cheap guitar out of a crate and make it sound amazing. Or, it's a poor craftsperson who blames the tool.

Now, it just so happens that as general frameworks go, IMO C#/.NET _is_ the signature Les Paul.

<comment><USER2> Oh no you did not just go there... :) I thought Java was the one everybody tried to copy :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why would anyone even bother to respond to a statement "Why you can't be a good .NET developer."? A person saying this is obviously deranged. And why is it worth having this on hacker news? Someone seems to be boosting this blog lately. Another useless blogpost on top of hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER46> Progressing to become a good developer, I believe requires for one to go through some StackOverflow questions and postings. Oh, tell those who say that you cannot be a good .NET developer that StackOverflow is built on the .NET platform. <><

</comment><comment><USER7> > Looking at the kind of directions that people leave .NET for, it > traditionally have been to the green green hills of Rails, then it was > Node.JS, not I think it is Elixir, although I'm not really paying attention. > That means that in the time a .NET developer (assuming that they investing > in themselves and continuously learning) invested in their platform, learned > a lot on how to make it work properly, the person who left for greener > pastures has had to learn multiple new frameworks and platforms. If you > think that this doesn't have an impact on productivity, you are kidding > yourself.

Vigorously asserted, but I'm guessing with zero evidence? I would certainly expect a productivity difference between someone who stayed in .NET and someone who left and learned something different, but my assumption (and it's nothing more than that) is that it would go in the opposite direction to what the author seems to assume.

<comment><USER3> Wide versus deep. The person who focused solely on .NET would be the expert that you'd want to look at a set of requirements and determine if .NET is the appropriate platform and then what technologies would be the best to utilize. The latter would be a person you'd want to lead the development efforts. His exposure to different paradigms would be helpful in writing efficient code, someone who can consult the expert on how to do the best practices in the technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The original author missed a vital viewpoint. He assumed that .net developers would never be good because they reluctant to try new technologies. He then evaluates that as a bad thing. Thats not quite so. This is a testament to how good and mature Microsofts ecosystem is, and the benefits thereof. In business sense. It doesn't make sense to hire a pool of developers who are good at various cutting edge technologies when the current stack can cater for all business needs. Most .net shops are enterprises which have no need for cutting edge technology. In my opinion,that conclusion should then lead to, should we rather not ask "what makes a good developer?". Theres no simple answer. Example, to a business that employees you to ship code, and you constantly maintain good quality and meeting deliverables. Would that not be considered a good developer?

</comment><comment><USER48> It should be below everyone to even respond to this anecdotal crap (the original article, not this response!). I dislike a lot of the ridiculous yak shaving that JS developers of large corporations try to push to the community, but I would never claim that this in any way affects each developer in the community.

> It'll not happen because as long as you're working on a platform that is > primarily used by derpy enterprise shops, you will continually be held back > because those derpy enteprise shops are continually be held back by the > derpy enterprise developers that work in the derpy enterprise shops.

Some people have real business problems to solve instead of rewriting their complete stack every half year, for fuck's sake!

<comment><USER49> Personally I enjoy knowing my paycheck comes from the sale of products and not ad revenue or investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A counterexample to the original post: Java. It is also all about stability and backwards compatibility, and now owned by Oracle (which is an epitome of enterprisey derpiness), but Java platform still somehow retains its vibrant, innovative community. One might say that Scala and perhaps Clojure are the main innovation drivers, but .NET has F#, which is no less innovative.

So, I think it must be something else. Perhaps their years of focus on Windows platform, which is preferred in enterprisey sweatshops, not in the latte- drinking hipster SV community.

</comment><comment><USER51> Real artists ship ([http://wiki.c2.com/?RealArtistsShip](http://wiki.c2.com/?RealArtistsShip)), and the frowned-upon enterprise .NET developers ship shit. Yes, the code may be disgusting, none of HTML5, CSS3 or Babel were used in a corporate portal, but. They. Ship. Shit. And this alon makes them good programmers.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, let's ship some rubbish and let the next guy fix the mess, because by the time it needs maintaining or majorly expanding we'll be long gone. Good job everybody! /s

<comment><USER51> Or else we can hand-craft our next isomorphic Node.js/Angular 7/React Redux Native Embedded SPA - of course "with all the <3 in the world" \- and in two months (just when we return from the latest and greatest meetupy conference) find out that one third of the dependencies went missing, one third got non- backwards-compatible changes, and the remaining ones were rewritten from the ground up just for the hell of it. And shit does not even start up properly, 90% of the unit tests fail unexplicably and no one wants to touch the codebase with a ten foot pole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The article being replied to made a common error: attributing a property of the human environment to the technical one instead. It is in the same category of error as thinking that a change in platform or programming language will solve all your problems.

</comment><comment><USER54> The problem with .NET is that C# is evolving too damn fast. So no matter what you build you can't avoid the feeling of been left behind by progress. I'm still using C# 4.0 for my projects. I can't be bothered to follow every little shinny thing MS decides to publish, or update VS every couple of years. I have shit to build. And one reason I don't bother following the trend is because MS has the tendency of abandoning technologies all too often. Anyone remembers Silverlight? Or how many rendering engines did they change in ASP.NET MVC.

<comment> UK-AL Compared to the technologies people learn today, .net is a glacier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> .NET technologically isn't bad.

What is sort of inconvenient is the dependency management, and that has as a consequence many .NET shops reinventing the wheel.

Another bad thing is the presence of closed source proprietary libraries, meaning they can't be forked and adapted/improved upon. This has somehow changed lately with Microsoft open sourcing some stuff.

<comment><USER56> Dependency management is bad on most platforms, it doesn't seem to be a solved problem yet.

<comment><USER55> I am not so sure about that.

Dependency management in .NET is not as good as let's say, Java, Python, Ruby, node.js.

Setting up your project to use Maven, pip, gems or npm respectively is very easy. I have tried nuget, but it is not as nearly as easy to use or reason about as other systems.

<comment><USER57> What exactly is wrong with NuGet? It's very simple, I think you just didn't give it a chance

For example a month ago Facebook broke .net's built in social login, all installed with NuGet, so I ran a single command and it was fixed.

If you're talking about front end, NuGet can handle it, or the recent versions of VS have a built in task runner that you can easily setup to run Gulp, Grunt, Yarn, Bower, whatever, if you so desire on build/debug/etc.

There are things to hate about the .Net ecosystem (TFS, I'm looking at you), but NuGet ain't one of them.

<comment><USER55> So far what I have seen with .NET project files is that: people modify them, VS generates code into those files, and they contain a lot of stuff. As a result, they're very painful to manage when trying to troubleshoot issues. Then, because the project files get modified all the time it's a constant source of conflicts in version control.

<comment><USER58> If project files get modified all the time then either you're constantly moving, adding, or removing files from the project, or constantly changing configurations and build settings. Neither should really happen _constantly_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> TL;DR: ad hominem arguments.

</comment><comment><USER21> The biggest problem I see is if you don't like to wield your knowledge over others and act like your way of doing things is the "greatest" way ever like a Nerdy Donald Trumps, non-techies don't take you seriously.

</comment><comment><USER60> A strong dev team will shine on any platform and in any language. A weak dev team, given the right tools, can at least be productive. Which is why business people who build business and need devs often settle on .net. Microsoft learned long ago how to cater for the needs of these weak teams.

Are there lots of weak tems on .net? Sure, I would argue that is true.

> you can't be a good .NET developer

Really? That is Rob's conslusion? That's laughable. The best programmers I know are extremely strong .net developers. I'm no Jon Skeet but I personaly view myself as a 7-8 (out of ten) irregardless of platform.

If you identify with the platform you're on you are doing it wrong.</comment>


Top HN articles of 2009 by social engagement - <AUTHOR> https://analytics.postrank.com/2009/feed/3d813cafb88dae0c470e6dddb41c0577

<comment><USER2> Particularly interested in feedback. Go to <http://postrank.com/all_topics> to create and edit as you see fit.</comment>


How to reduce workplace stress? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a software developer and find that my body is really suffering from the stress at my workplace.  For example, I am usually fine sitting at my cube working but when a bunch of priority 1 bug reports come in I can feel my body fill with cortisol and it feels terrible.  I think it's the body's fight or flight mechanism kicking in, but I can neither flight nor fly, I'm stuck at my cube!  The problem is made worse by the fact that my company leaves everything to the last minute, e.g. reconfigures (and screws up) critical systems 5 minutes before an important demo, doesn't leave enough time for testing before shipping a release leaving lots of problems to be solved in the field, so I feel like I have no control over the high stress problems that are coming inbound my way.  Thanks so much for any responses - Fred. <comment><USER2> I work in a very stressful workplace with the same types of stress (e.g. constant changes in direction, client commitments made without checking with the staff who will deliver, etc). Unfortunately, the root cause of these problems lies with the company leadership which makes them exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to correct. The only way to remove this type of stress is to leave for another company. As you seek a new job, be open with prospective employers about the reasons you are looking, and prepare questions to verify that you're next employer doesn't have the same problems.

I wish you luck -- these circumstances are ver difficult, and they can destroy your health. Run, don't walk away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response, excellent advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Polish up your resumé and start shopping around for another job. Places that manage by panic attack do not get better, unless the leadership is changed.

Seriously, don't wait, you are shortening your life by accepting that sort of phantom stress. You have skills, you are not trapped in this job by anything other than your desire to carry through with things you started and your fear of change.

<comment><USER4> Agreed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is your company's process like? I mean, if they get what you are referring to a "priority 1 bug", I'm assuming this could either be a data related bug or an actual code bug (as you wouldn't know yet at that point). Does your company expect you to just make a fix immediately, if its a code bug, and then they push it into production right away? If they are doing anything resembling this then run, don't walk away as this is terrible practice and will definitely make you go crazy after a while (I have worked for some companies that did similar things). At my current job I do have to deal with a lot of bugs but, for one, they realize their software is basically crap (10 year old legacy code base) and don't expect things fixed immediately and once I can find that its actually a code bug the pressure comes off a bit as they are very strict about release cycles and testing so they rarely push fixes into production sooner than 1 month. Data related bugs tend to have patterns to them that become apparent after seeing a few of them over time, at least in my experience, and usually become easier to deal with the longer you work with a system.

I don't mean to start any flame language wars but am a bit curious what sort of language / platform you are working with. In my experience, companies that build their products with dynamic languages (not strongly typed, etc) tend to play things a bit more "fast and loose" and the workload can really pile up. They usually don't know about best practices like test drive development, etc and don't care, even when this is pointed out. This led me to steer my career towards working with a strongly typed, compiled language (I do server-side web dev) and, at least with my current job, I have noticed a much more refreshing approach as far as professional development practices compared to other jobs where dynamic languages were used.

</comment><comment><USER6> As others have said, really you need to try to leave. Bad companies grind on because people stay there, getting dumped on.

Unfortunately there are many idiots in the workplace, and that translates to many bad workplaces. ( _Office Space_ _Dilbert_ etc are not funny because they're off the wall; they're uncomfortably close to real life.) But don't let this put you off from leaving. No-one should be put in the situation that you're in.

You could try adjusting work / life balance:- get more exercise, drink much less caffeine, get a self-help book or course about dealing with stress and use those techniques at work (and remember, it's just a job), remember to take regular time-outs (you're using a monitor, so you should be having at least 5 minutes every hour), don't get pressured to do silly hours, etc etc.

FWIW I have a lot of sympathy for you. Bad working environments suck, and suck hard. Employers need to learn that treating the workforce humanely is in the best interest of their business.

</comment><comment><USER6> (Some definitions for this post: "Stress" == bad, harmful, something to be avoided for everyone. "Pressure" == not harmful, enjoyed by some people.)

Possibly not relevant to you but: In the UK your employer owes you a legal duty to protect you from stress in the workplace.

The duty is clearly defined in law, and has been tested by the courts and employment tribunal many many times.

But - so what? You need to be able to turn that protection into something that helps you.

Seek advice; and then gather evidence of what things are too stressful, and if anything could be done to reduce that to a manageable level. Then go see a line manager and ask to talk. Present these things, and see if you can work something out. Realise that you probably can't, but at least you now have some protection if you decide to leave.</comment>


Current most popular idea, proposed on the global virtual hackathon - <AUTHOR> https://hack.ether.camp/#/idea/solidifier---formal-verification-of-solidity-programs <comment><USER2> This is something smart contracts really need. Had this been in place during the DAO creation $150,000,000 may not have been stolen. I don't think code can ever be truly 'bug free' but this would make it a damn sight safer.

<comment><USER3> If they can get this thing to work it will have an amazing impact on future development in the field of cryptocurrencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quoting Balaji S. Srinivasan

"Thesis: the only things you want in a blockchain language are tools to update distributed state. Everything else should be outside."</comment>


Should I work for free? - <AUTHOR> http://www.shouldiworkforfree.com

<comment><USER2> Here's my version: NO! You should always get something in return for your hard work.

Of course, in a few cases on there, you ARE getting something for your hard work (or repaying favors you already got), it's just not cold, hard cash.

Any trade that isn't in balance is bad for both sides. It may not be immediate, but it will be eventually.

<comment><USER3> I find that my personal projects are the ones that get the most visiblity and recognition. If I were to think of purely in terms of am I getting cash for this time - then I would probably never spend time on any project or startup where there was no money in it for me right away.

Think about all those open source projects on GitHub - if nobody ever worked "for free", you would get such great wonderful projects like some amazing jquery pluggins and what not.

I think when people think in a small short term view like this, they severely limit themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps this is overly simplistic, but by definition "work" is stuff I wouldn't do for free.

I definitely do technical things for free, but I'm free to walk away any time -- I think the essence of "work" is the inability to walk away (without terminating whatever contract is in place).</comment>